Desperate journalist Nick Bishop takes a job profiling new mindfulness app, Clarity. Relaxing meditations are mixed with haunting ‘sleep songs’ where a woman’s voice sings users into a deep sleep.
Then the nightmares begin.
Vivid and chilling, they feature a dead woman who calls Nick by name, whispering guidance – or are they threats?
Soon, he can’t escape her voice. And that’s when he makes a terrifying discovery: no one involved with Clarity has any interest in his article. Their interest is in him.
Because whilst he may not have any memory of it, he’s one of twenty people who have heard this sinister song before, and the only one who is still alive…

Scott Carson’s ‘The Chill’ was one of my favourite horror novels of 2023. I described it as “A compelling combination of the plausible and the fantastic that took me on a wild ride to dark places”. That description also fits ‘Where They Wait‘, although the two books are very different in terms of plot and characters.

What I liked most about this book was how the horror kept escalating, not on the back of jump scare moments but by the slow, inexorable revelation of a threat that melded science, technology, well-documented but gruesome history, local folklore and the megalomaniacal will of a wannabe Tech Bro. It pulled no punches, and it was beautifully done. 

The book started with Nick Bishop, a previously high-profile but now out-of-work journalist, accepting a commission to write a fluff piece on a Tech start-up for his alma mater’s college magazine. It’s a favour offered by a long-time friend. Someone he was close to at college. Someone who stayed in the small town Nick long ago left behind.

At first, this read like one of those stories where the local boy made good returns home with his tail between his legs, hooks up with people from his past and rethinks all those might-have-beens until they turn into a happily-ever-after. Except this wasn’t a Hallmark movie, and no one in Nick’s home town is who Nick remembers them being. 

Enter the Tech Bro wannabe whom Nick is writing the fluff piece about, and we seem to move into an investigative journalist uncovers corporate villainy story with some interesting twists around the nature of memory. Except, again, this isn’t quite what it seems. The Tech Bro image is a little dated. The start-up business seems a little hollow. 

Then, like a lietmotiv that’s been passing unnoticed in the background, but slowly came to dominate the score, the spooky part of the story emerges. I loved the way the spookiness was grounded in a mix of local folklore and verifiable, if deplorable, history and the way both of those fitted into the technical narrative about the nature of memory and dreams. 

I liked that the spooky part, the tech part and the personal relationships gone wrong part were all woven together, reinforcing one another.

It was always clear that things would not end well, but the ending still surprised me.  It managed to be darker and more hopeful than I’d expected.